Return of the Dress Code

(page 2 of 2)

Students taking Personal Selling and Relationship Marketing courses have been required to abide by a business casual dress policy since the fall of 2003, and all students taking the professional sales sequence were required to follow suit last fall. It was only a matter of time before the marketing department stepped in, says Showers.

Strictly Dressing to Impress

Showers and other faculty drew up the "Business Casual Professional Dress Code" requirements last winter, sending out a memo to students this summer with details on the code, along with the school's rationale for the move. Included in the memo were detailed guidelines that cautioned students against wearing dresses or skirts "shorter than four inches above the knee," and prohibited them from wearing cargo pants, jeans, and sweatpants, among other items. "Clothing that works well for the beach, yard work, dance clubs, exercise sessions, and sports contests are not appropriate for a professional appearance," the memo reads. Hats are also not permitted, though allowances are made for students who need to wear head covering for religious or cultural reasons.

If students don't adhere to the dress code, they get a zero for the day and are asked to leave the classroom. The faculty member that implements the punishment is required to talk with the student about why the outfit is inappropriate for the classroom.

The move has drawn criticism from human resources consultants, including Pegine Echevarria, a member of the Society for Human Resource Management's National Workplace Diversity Expertise Panel, who believes faculty at the school might be asking too much of students, especially if they are freshmen or sophomores. "They're going to find themselves bopping heads with students from a cultural and a youth perspective," she says.

Legally and Otherwise Accepted

Legally, however, it appears that the school is within its rights to ask students to abide by the dress code. The memo sent out to students was approved by the school's legal department, Longfellow says.

Ed Yohnka, director of communications and public policy at the Illinois branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, says he had never heard of a case where a dress code was disputed at a college or graduate level. Dress codes at public elementary schools are disputed because there is a "compulsory nature" to the education, he says. Students who attend higher education institutions go of their own volition, he notes. "I can't find any instance where a question like this has ever been litigated," he said.

Marketing students at the school are gradually beginning to accept, and even embrace, the new dress code standards. Students from Pi Sigma Epsilon, the school's co-ed professional marketing fraternity, ordered polo shirts with the fraternity's letters on them, rather than the T-shirts they used to buy—which are now not allowed in class. With the polos, they can still wear their fraternity's letters to class, says Jen Miller, a senior marketing major who is president of the fraternity.

However, most marketing students are unhappy that the requirement isn't being implemented uniformly within the entire College of Business, Miller adds. Marketing students don't always have time to change after classes that require the dress code; as a result, they find themselves standing out in their nonmarketing classes. "We're accepting this as a privilege, but still, the other people are sitting in class with their pajama pants on and we have to wear high heels, or other dress shoes," Miller says. "You can spot the marketing majors on campus. This definitely singles us out."

Damast is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.